This article addresses e-mail communication between university students and a lecturer in the Czech Republic. A total of 260 e-mail messages that contained a high imposition request for action and were addressed to faculty were analysed.
The researcher examined verbal means of expressing politeness in forms of address, opening and closing formulas, degrees of directness and amounts of syntactic, lexical/phrasal and external modification used in the e-mail requests of Czech students to faculty. The focus was on the selection of a politeness strategy.